[Repair and restore will have a cooldown of 10 days. He can not spam it. I made it too OP. More details will be explained in later chapters.]
I talked to Meemaw that evening before dinner, catching her in the kitchen while she still had a few minutes to herself. Georgie stood beside me the whole time, nodding along whenever I paused. I explained exactly what we were planning to do and asked if she'd back us up at the table if Mom needed convincing.
She seemed genuinely happy to help her two grandsons out, so long as it didn't end up disrupting her own routine in the process. That easy agreement wavered a little the moment I mentioned that if Mom said no outright, we might need to borrow her garage instead.
"You know, boys, I still have an active social life," she said, setting her glass down and lifting her chin. "I go out with people. I need my privacy." Georgie and I both gagged in perfect unison at the very thought of what exactly that meant.
Meemaw wasn't done teasing us yet, either.
"Don't you two go looking so scandalized," she said, waving a hand between us. "I was young once too, you know."
"Meemaw, please," I said, holding up both hands. "We really did not need that mental picture today."
Georgie muttered. "Young meemaw? I can not imagine that."
"Oh, hush, the both of you," she said, swatting Georgie lightly with her napkin. "When you're my age, you'll understand”
"I don't think I can" I said. "Just keep your love life out of the garage."
"No promises, Charlie," she said, giving me a wink over the rim of her glass.
She never actually said no to our original question, though, which in my book counted as a yes. At the very least, I had a backup plan now. If nothing else worked out, renting a garage somewhere was always an option, though a considerably more expensive one.
____
It was dinner time in the Cooper household, and everyone had settled into their usual seats. A platter of fried chicken sat beside a bowl of buttered corn, a basket of warm biscuits, and a dish of collard greens. Meemaw had joined us tonight like usual nights.
"So I saw my lawyer today," she started, swirling the glass of wine in her hand.
"Why?" Mom asked, clearly caught off guard by the announcement.
"I'm putting my last will and testament together," Meemaw said simply, as though she were discussing the weather.
"We're gonna miss ya," Dad said with a smirk, the implication behind it obvious enough to anyone paying attention.
"Georgie!" Mom snapped, shooting him a sharp look across the table.
"Don't you worry, I ain't leaving him squat," Meemaw shot back without missing a beat. It was a familiar routine in this house, the two of them trading jabs like it came as naturally as breathing.
"Are you dying?" Georgie asked, his face completely blank, without a single wrinkle of real concern anywhere on it.
"We're all dying, honey, from the second we're born," Meemaw said, clearly amused by the question. "It's just a long slip and slide into the dark after that."
"I don't wanna die. I've only kissed one boy so far," Missy chimed in, adding her own two cents to the conversation entirely unprompted.
"What?" Mom gasped, nearly dropping her fork onto her plate.
"Relax, it was a long time ago," Missy said, as casually as if she were commenting on the weather outside.
"Are you relaxed?" Dad asked Mom, letting out a long sigh, wearing the exact expression of a man who had just learned something he desperately wished he hadn't.
"Shelly, you haven't touched your plate. Something wrong, baby?" Mom asked, clearly grateful for any excuse to steer the conversation elsewhere.
"I was just thinking about the optimal height-to-width ratio for a reusable rocket," Sheldon said matter-of-factly, as if that were a perfectly normal thing to be mulling over at the dinner table.
Meemaw perked up immediately. "I was just thinking the very same thing," she said, delighting Sheldon to no end. "Love you, moonpie," she added, clearly entertained by her own joke.
"It depends," I said, to rile up sheldon a bit. "It depends on the thrust-to-weight ratio you're targeting and how much fuel mass you need against structural weight. Generally, a slimmer, taller frame cuts down on drag during ascent, but you still need enough width underneath for stable landing legs and fuel tankage. Somewhere around ten to one tends to balance both needs reasonably well."
I said all of it while eating my dinner peacefully, quietly working out the right moment to bring up my own agenda. By the time I'd finished talking, everyone at the table was already looking at me.
"How did you know that?" Sheldon asked, sounding thoroughly exasperated.
"Well, I've got this," I said, tapping the side of my head. It seemed I really was the smartest Cooper at the table after all.
"But you'd still need a computer to run the actual simulations and get the exact number," Sheldon said, a note of hope creeping into his voice.
"That we would," I told him, though I already had a plan to borrow my girlfriend's father's computer, since the man worked as an accountant and had a perfectly good one sitting around.
I wasn't about to mention that part to Sheldon, though, or he'd spend the next month begging me to take him along to meet her, something I had zero intention of ever doing.
Sheldon shot up from the table almost immediately, heading off to write down everything he'd just learned from me or in hopes of proving me wrong somehow only for Mom to call after him from the kitchen doorway.
"Shelly, eat your dinner first."
"I'll do it in my room, Mom," he yelled back, already halfway down the hall.
Now, I supposed, it was my turn.
I looked over at Georgie and tilted my head slightly toward Mom, silently gesturing for him to take the lead on this one. He shook his head fast, eyes wide with something close to panic, mouthing the words you do it back at me without making a sound.
I sighed, already knowing full well I'd be the one starting this conversation whether I liked it or not. Georgie could be a coward in front of mom when it actually counted.
"What is it, Charlie?" Mom asked, finally noticing the silent back-and-forth happening between the two of us across the table.
"Well, Mom, me and Georgie are planning on doing something new," I told her, picking my words carefully.
"Georgie can explain," I said quickly, shifting the spotlight onto him instead. She was already annoyed with me over the curb-painting business despite everything I'd said in my own defense, and I had absolutely no interest in taking another direct hit so soon.
"Go on, Georgie, spit it out," Dad said, using that particular tone that left no room for stalling.
"We bought a car to fix up, and we're gonna sell it for a profit," Georgie blurted out all in one breath. Dad didn't seem too bothered by any of it, so long as we were spending our own money and being smart about the whole thing. He trusted me that far, at least. Mom, on the other hand, was an entirely different story.
"Wow. You bought a car? Aren't you a little young for that? Is this about your girlfriend?" Missy asked, sounding genuinely curious, but she had no idea that she was tossing more fuel onto the fire. By the look settling over Mom's face, she'd apparently decided I'd turned into some kind of reckless teenager overnight.
"It was all Charlie's idea," Georgie said quickly, jabbing a finger straight at me the moment he caught Mom's irritated glance landing on him.
"Charlie! I told you I want you focused on school, not all this. The Bible talks about greed,(bunch of religious nonsense).......and here you are again, going behind my back the same way you did with those curb-painting jobs, and now you've gone and bought an entire car without so much as asking me first. I don't understand why you can't just be a normal fourteen-year-old for once."
"Do you even know how to fix a car, Charlie? Don't go wasting your money, kid," Dad said, though there was at least a note of genuine consideration underneath the warning, like he was weighing the possibility rather than shutting it down outright.
"At least let him talk, Mary. Maybe the boy can actually do it. It's his own money he earned in the first place," Meemaw said, sighing as she looked across the table at her uptight daughter.
"I know I can do it. I've already thought this through. I won't even be driving it, just fixing it up and reselling it once it's done. What I really need is somewhere to actually work on it. I was thinking I could use the garage," I said, finally getting to the real point of the conversation. Better to rip the bandage off quickly than keep dragging the whole thing out any longer.
"You are not doing this here. You do not have my permission," Mom said, folding her arms the moment she realized she actually held some leverage over this particular decision.
I honestly couldn't tell if she genuinely believed it was a bad idea, or if she just wanted to remind me who was still in charge. Either way, she was being difficult about it.
"But Mom—" I groaned.
"No means no," she said, arms still crossed, completely unmoved by anything I'd said so far.
"Dad, please, help me out here," I said, turning to him, though I already had a decent guess at what his answer would be.
"Mary, Charlie's a responsible kid, maybe it's not as bad….." he offered gently.
"George!" Mom said sharply, and that alone was enough to shut him up entirely before he could continue.
"Just do what Mom says," George muttered immediately, he went back to his dinner. Oh man my dad was totally whipped.
"Mary, Charlie's already ahead of his entire class. Why not just let the boy find his own thing?" Meemaw tried again, attempting to back me up, but Mom had already stopped listening to anyone else at the table by that point. She could be so infuriating sometimes.
Something inside me finally snapped. My palm came down against the table hard enough to rattle every plate and glass sitting on it. Missy jumped in her seat, gasping as her spoon slipped from her fingers and clattered loudly onto the floor.
"Damn it, Mom, why do you always have to be so stubborn about absolutely nothing?" I snapped, my voice rising more than I actually meant it to. "It's not like I'm out doing drugs or something. I just want to do the one thing I actually like."
My chair scraped back hard against the floor as I shoved myself up from the table, my plate still half full in front of me. It seemed even geniuses lose their temper sometimes.
Everyone at the table went quiet for a second, clearly caught off guard, since blowing up like that wasn't something I did often. That alone made the whole outburst land even harder than it might have otherwise.
Mom, though, could be completely unreasonable about certain things, and as much as I loved her, that particular streak of stubbornness drove me up the wall every single time.
"Charlie Cooper, you behave yourself," Mom shouted after me, though I was already halfway across the room, heading straight for the hallway.
"Charlie, you get back here this instant," she called out again, but I had no intention of listening to her right then. Honestly, in that moment, I couldn't wait to be old enough to finally get out of that house for good. I hated seeing this particular side of her.
I shut myself in my room, half tempted to drive my fist straight through the wall, though I wasn't quite reckless enough to actually punch a hole in my own bedroom over it.
A minute later, Georgie knocked softly on the door, but I told him flatly that I didn't feel like talking right now. It took a few minutes for the anger to fully drain out of me, and once it finally did, I mostly just felt embarrassed for reacting the way I had.
I let out a long sigh, turning the whole situation over in my head. Here I was, surrounded by kids my age already smoking behind the gym or getting their first tattoos on a dare, and meanwhile I was a genius student, on track to graduate early with a perfect transcript, already earning my own money on the side.
By any reasonable measure, I was practically the perfect kid, and yet somehow I'd still managed to end up in a shouting match at the dinner table. What more does she want from me?
A while later, Dad knocked on my door. I let him in.
"Charlie."
"Why'd you actually act out like that today, son?" he asked, clearly puzzled, since blowing up over something this small wasn't really like me. I'd always been fairly even-tempered. I couldn't even remember crying much past the age of eight, aside from when dad got admitted. I'd always just been a quiet kid.
"Mom always gets in the way whenever I try to do something I actually want to do," I said.
"She lets Sheldon do whatever he wants. For God's sake, he built an actual rocket and got the FBI showing up at our front door, and she didn't say a word about it against him that time. But she tells me no the second I want to work on cars. How is that fair, Dad?" I ranted, letting everything spill out at once without stopping to breathe.
"You're right, son. You two are different, and maybe your mom isn't handling this exactly right either. But she's still your mother, and she loves you," he said.
He spent a while after that just talking with me about cars, and about everything I'd gotten up to that day, gently steering my mind away from the darker thoughts still circling in my head. I appreciated that more than I let on at the time.
"So what kind of car was it?" Dad asked, sounding genuinely interested.
"A 1971 Ford Maverick," I told him, and from there he peppered me with question after question, testing everything he actually knew about cars against what I claimed to understand.
I answered each one without hesitation, walking him through the engine trouble and what it would likely take to fix it, and by the end of it, I could tell he was quietly impressed, even if he wasn't about to say so outright.
He sighed and rested a hand on top of my head.
"I'll talk to your mother, but you're going to apologize for acting out today."
"Yes, Dad," I said, and he studied me for another few seconds before finally heading back out of the room.
I let out a breath and waited a while longer, until I heard the murmur of Mom and Dad's voices finally go quiet down the hall. They must have worked through it between themselves by then.
I made my way out of my room. Meemaw was still around, and the rest of my siblings had already retreated to their own rooms for the night. I found Mom first, and it was obvious she'd been crying, her eyes red and rimmed, faint tear stains still visible on her cheeks.
Seeing that hit me harder than I expected, and I suddenly felt genuinely sorry for how the whole thing had gone. Dad caught my eye from across the room and gave me a small, steady nod.
"I'm sorry, Mom. If you want, I won't do it," I said, my chest tight with something heavier than I expected to feel. It wasn't as though there weren't other paths open to me anyway. I figured I'd just have to be more careful going forward, and keep this particular part of my life a little further from my parents from now on.
She let out a slow breath, smiled, and crossed the room to pull me into a hug.
"I'm sorry too, Charlie. You can do your work. But you have to promise me you'll be careful," she said, still smiling. Caught off guard, I glanced over at Dad while she held onto me, and he just gave me a small smile and a thumbs up from across the room.
I still had no idea exactly how he'd managed to talk her around, but Meemaw was smiling too, which told me it had probably taken the two of them working together behind the scenes.
"Yes, Mom, I will be," I said back.
"Woohoo! She said yes!" Georgie shouted from somewhere down the hall, and Missy let out a cheer right along with him. It seemed like the entire house had been listening in on the whole conversation from the very start.
Looking back on it now, I felt a small twinge of regret for turning such a minor disagreement into such a dramatic scene at the dinner table.
_________
[AN: This chapter shows how Charlie convinces his parents to go along with his plans.
It's always the elder siblings who have to pave the way for the younger ones. It is our duty to help our parents become more accepting.]
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